The slave-made solar panels are toxic and expensive.
How can you Green New Dealies be okay with this?!
Everyday I look out my window and see my neighbor’s roof, and cannot miss noting that it is covered completely with solar panels. Installed for ‘free’ by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
It sickens me. Anyone who knows me at all, is aware of my lifelong fight against slavery - especially the trafficking of children.
I believe my neighbor had good intentions and was just seduced by the likes of CNN and NPR talking heads - the CCP’s head propagandists in the USA. Or they were lead astray by MA Senator ‘Malarky’, a sponsor/author of that horrific plan - Green New Deal.
Truth is … solar panels are toxic waste, very expensive, and use slave labor to mine, to build and to recycle. Truly a menace to the human race.
Michael Shellenberger’s substack article covers these topics thoroughly. “Solar Panels Will Create 50 Times More Waste & Cost 4 Times More Than Predicted, New Harvard Business Review Study Finds”
Mining Materials
Minerals in the technology, include aluminum, cadmium, copper, gallium, indium, iron, lead, nickel, silica, silver, tellurium, tin and zinc. Solar PhotoVoltaic technology increases the need for energy storage units, both in the form of individual batteries for private use and on a large scale in electrical grids. Therefore mining is also needed for those minerals in lithium-ion batteries - aluminium, cobalt, iron, lead, lithium, manganese, nickel and graphite.
There are human rights and environmental risks associated with all the minerals used in solar PV and lithium-ion batteries. Human rights risks include poor worker health and safety, conflict over land rights with local and Indigenous peoples, and labour rights issues including child labour and forced labour. Environmental impacts, such as pollution of air, soil and water, as well as damage to the biodiversity of surrounding ecosystems through poor waste management, are also prevalent in both large-scale and artisanal mining. - www.igfmining.org
Solar Panel Manufacturing in China
Solar power industry relies heavily on Xinjiang — a region in China that has become synonymous with forced labor for Muslim minorities - in particular, for polysilicon, the element integral to making solar cells. By 2020 it provided about 45% of the world’s supply.
The house bill H.R.6210 – Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act - imposes restrictions related to China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region, prohibiting imports from Xinjiang and imposing sanctions on those responsible for human rights violations there.
“Goods manufactured or produced in Xinjiang shall not be entitled to entry into the United States unless Customs and Border Protection (1) determines that the goods were not manufactured by convict labor, forced labor, or indentured labor under penal sanctions; and (2) reports such a determination to Congress and to the public.” - congress.gov
End of Life Cycle: Reclamation at E-Waste sites vs Landfill Dump
Three years ago I published a long article at Forbes arguing that solar panels weren’t clean but in fact produced 300 times more toxic waste than high-level nuclear waste. But in contrast to nuclear waste, which is safely stored and never hurts anyone, solar panel waste risks exposing poor trash-pickers in sub-Saharan Africa. The reason was because it was so much cheaper to make new solar panels from raw materials than to recycle them, and would remain that way, given labor and energy costs. - Michael Shellenberger
But it is not just Subsaharan Africa involved in unsafe forced child labor. Bangladesh also has a major e-waste reclamation industry. And they force kids to wade into ponds filled with panels shipped over from the USA to have those ‘little brown children’ clean up their ‘Clean Energy’ messes.
The manual dismantling and recycling stages include processes like open burning and acid treatment. E-waste contains around 1000 different chemicals, many of which contain high levels of toxins and hazardous elements. If e-waste is not recycled and disposed of in an environmentally prudent manner, it can pose serious threats to both human health and the environment. - Rashna Raya Rahman, Naureen Shafinaz Mahboob
But, outta sight, outta mind.
Not In My Back Yard NIMBY
So recycling solar panels would be extremely! expensive if they were disposed of safely, using legit labor. But the alternative to reclamation is to dump them all into landfills; there, the toxic metals they contain can leach out into the environment and pose a public health hazard if they contaminate the groundwater supply. These metals are neuro, cardio and marrow toxins. Carcinogenic, too.
Remember ‘Love Canal’? That’s the future the Green New Dealies want for YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. So, be careful what you wish for.
REFERENCES
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-everything-they-said-about-solar
https://www.igfmining.org/minerals-green-economy-solar-panels-lithium-ion-batteries/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/forced-labor-xinjiang-solar
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinjiang-uyghur-labor/
https://www.thedailystar.net/op-ed/politics/electronic-waste-the-story-bangladesh-121792
https://globalrec.org/law-report/bangladesh/
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Toxic metals are seeping into our BONES as they're released into the air during the production of smartphones, batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, study warns https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9900851/Electronic-waste-Toxic-metals-seeping-BONES-study-warns.html